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7 Challenges of Cloud Adoption

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This week’s guest blog from Kaminario explores the challenges that may be faced when making the transition, so you know what to look out for to ensure your journey to the cloud is as smooth as possible. The full blog is available to view below, as well as a link to the original at the bottom.

As we discussed in our previous post, statistics show that enterprises are quickly moving to adopt cloud technologies. But as you may remember, the applications they’re moving to the cloud—typically auxiliary applications that aren’t on the business’ critical path—proves that, behind the numbers, enterprises are a bit leery of going all in. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the serious challenges facing enterprise cloud adoption, exploring some of the main reasons why businesses are being so cautious in moving their mission-critical apps to the cloud.

1. Security

For IT professionals who are used to being able to literally put their hands on the servers that are processing and storing your data, moving to the cloud can seem like giving up a lot of control—and for good reason! Trusting your data with another provider can be a scary proposition and one that ultimately keeps many enterprises in the status quo. After all, a single unpatched server may be the only thing that stands between your company and the damning headlines about your data breach.

2. Compliance/Control

How do you ensure that your cloud vendor of choice meets your governance rules and compliance regulations if you don’t actually control it? Ensuring that all of your IT assets are properly provisioned and maintained is top-of-mind for most IT executives, making it easy to understand how moving important apps outside of your direct purview may cause concerns. Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Sarbanes-Oxley, and others make the stakes even higher.

3. Managing Multiple Clouds

Combining public and private clouds into a hybrid approach is increasingly more common among enterprises, but it isn’t without its issues — especially when it comes to the management of multiple clouds. In many cases, the ability to communicate across clouds is limited at best. Having multiple vendors, tools, and service level agreements can add to the confusion and frustration.

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4. Performance

The number one reason why enterprises struggle with cloud adoption is that they have very valid concerns about the cloud’s ability to provide the level of performance their business demands. Concerns about IOPS, throughput, and latency—all typically poor performers for cloud environments—often cause enterprises to take a step back and reevaluate their options.

5. Cost Management

The cloud offers enterprises maximum flexibility to scale up and down services as they are needed. But along with that flexibility comes concerns about containing costs. Some enterprises find it difficult to predict “how much” cloud they’ll need down the line, leading to worries about costs going higher than anticipated.

6. Vendor Lock-In

Tied to the concerns about cost is that of vendor lock-in. Enterprises are loathe to put all of their eggs into one vendor’s proverbial basket, fearing that they’ll be stuck with that vendor once they make the decision. Because the cost (and pain) of refactoring applications and migrating to the new cloud is so high, most vendors inadvertently end up getting “locked-in” to a particular vendor, functioning at the mercy of their product roadmap, upgrade schedule, support (or lack thereof), and pricing whims.

7. Lack of Expertise

Cloud technology is moving fast, and keeping up with it is no easy task—especially for an enterprise IT professional who has more pressing issues on their plate. Enterprises that may benefit from moving to the cloud may be late to the game simply because their current team is afraid to proceed, not knowing what they don’t know and lacking up-to-date knowledge about cloud benefits and offerings.

There is Hope to Overcome Cloud Adoption Challenges

Clearly, there are a number of challenges that prevent enterprises from fully embracing cloud adoption. From concerns about security, control, and performance… to frustrations surrounding the management of multiple clouds and getting locked-in to a specific vendor, there is no shortage of reasons that enterprises should think carefully before signing on the dotted line. But there is hope! In the next blog post—the final in this series—we’ll introduce the concept of “data plane virtualization” and will explain how it alleviates cloud adoption challenges so that enterprises can get all of the benefits with none of the risks.

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Troy Platts

Troy has spent over 20 years helping organisations solve their data, storage and compute conundrums. He is a regular speaker at vendor events and spends any free time he has keeping abreast of advances in data platform technologies. He also makes a mean curry.

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